February 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 55

Operations
Model of Efficiency
Naperville's maintenance cost modeling system
By Elizabeth Beard

I

t's a problem faced by park and recreation agencies across the country: New
parks and facilities are added each year with unpredictable effects on the
long-term, system-wide maintenance budget. This can lead to problems in
maintaining consistent quality standards across a park system, especially in the
absence of standardized park assessment measures.
" The history of our district, very similar to others, is that you pick up two or
three parks a year, you add a playground or two, but maintenance isn't included, " says Kevin Finnegan, director of parks at the Naperville Park District near
Chicago, Illinois. " So that's where we were, too. You find yourself being so
heavily task-oriented on a day-to-day basis that you have no plan to follow, that
you have no future vision on where you want your parks to be....It all becomes
garbage, litter, and bathrooms, right? "
Thanks in part to his MBA background, Finnegan began to look at the
problem a little differently.
" I have always believed that in the
public sector you can apply real busi-

ness solutions to issues, " Finnegan
says. " Where is the biggest hit here?
Where are we, and where do we want
to be? We did have a maintenance
plan in place, but we had no means

to measure how successful we were or
how difficult it was to meet the expectations. "
Naperville is a city of 141,800 residents with 140 parks that the park
department localizes into three divisions: north, central, and south.
Those parks get heavy use from 650
teams playing more than 12,000
games annually. Maintaining service
standards across the three divisions
became a high priority, especially after a survey in 2008 revealed only 39
parks were meeting all of the maintenance service standards. But was
it a matter of people, process, or resources?
People
Naperville instituted a number of
no-cost and low-cost strategies to
keep park maintenance running as
efficiently as possible. One no-cost
technique was to assign ownership
of various maintenance tasks at each
park to particular staff. For example,
one staff person is now responsible for
shrub beds, one or two staff members
handle the turf, and another cares for
the landscape beds at a series of parks.
A single person can be given credit
or held accountable for conditions at
their parks. A standardized inspection
process implemented through a threeday training program means that all
parks are assessed for conditions (such
as the percent of broadleaf coverage)
in the same way.
" We found the very first year that,
with that ownership, we improved five

54

Parks & Recreation

| FEBRUARY 2013 | WWW.NRPA.ORG



February 2013 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of February 2013 - Parks & Recreation

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